This is my first video tutorial ever!Do check out this video first, it shows all 3 hours of drawing in less than 3 minutes, and it's quite funny too :-)

If you would like to watch it in real time, download vladstudio_lion_makingof.m4v (256 Mb, 3 hours 12 minutes). Right now, I did not put my voice with commentaries, no time for that (as always! argh). I'll see if I can do it later - however, the video itself should be quite self-explanatory. You will probably want to fast-forward it often, but I decided not to cut the video myself, and publish full version, because everybody will want to skip different parts.

I hope you will find it useful - let me know your opinion in the comments! Thanks.

I was inspired by a photo of beautiful eagle ray, and I wanted to create an artwork that includes the eagle ray underwater, and the sky above him, with stars shining.
So, the artwork will include the following parts:
- underwater;
- sky with stars;
- eagle ray.

Let's start with the water.
Set foreground color to saturated blue. Select Pen tool (P), and create a shape that fills bottom half of image, with wave on top, similar to shown here.

Let's start with mountains (though the particular order of steps is not important now). Switch to Pen tool (P), set foreground color to black, and start drawing mountains with short strokes" or pen (click - drag a little - release). "

In this micro tutorial, I will describe my favorite features of Adobe Photoshop Brush tool. To learn all features, you can simply open Brush palette (Window menu - Brushes), change each setting and try the result when you draw a stroke.

The first setting is Tip Shape. You can choose from pre-loaded shapes or you can create your own... more on that later!

Let's start with underwater background. The easiest way to draw it is radial gradient. Set foreground color to lighter blue and background color to darker blue. Select Gradient tool, then select Radial on toolbar, then draw gradient from top-center of image to right-bottom (or left-bottom).

In this simple tutorial, I will write how I made Sketchbook series of wallpapers. I wanted to draw small sheet of notebook paper on wooden table. To start, I found an appropriate stock image of wood texture from www.sxc.hu.

I was asked how to create wave texture background that I made for one of my wallpapers. I wrote this tutorial from my answer because it might be useful for someone else. So, to start, we need horizontal stripes background. For that, we need a stripe pattern. Create new document with 4 pixels height (you can also try different size).

Well the process of designing Fire Dragon wallpaper is not full of interesting tips and tricks. It was actually 24 hours of drawing with brushes of different sizes and colors. As always, to start, we need background. Set foreground to dark red, background to black. Select Gradient tool, choose Radial type, fill the document dragging the mouse from bottom to top of image.

First step is to create blurred grass in the background. Set foreground color to dark green, background color to black. Then switch to gradient tool (G), make sure that current gradient is green-to-black, select Radial gradient (on top bar), then draw a big gradient from center to the edge of image.

Hello! In this tutorial, I will show how I created the Rainbows wallpaper. First, create dark sky in the background. For that, set forecolor to dark blue and back color to black, switch to Gradient tool (G), change gradient type to Radial, and create gradient from bottom to top of document.

This is a short tutorial about how to bring some night and mystery into your bright sunny photo. Here is the photo I took in the forest near my home. IMPORTANT NOTE - all steps below are true only for this very photo! This tutorial is only to describe general approach. Trust your eyes when applying effects.

In this short tutorial, I'll share the technique I discovered while trying to quickly draw a creature with hairy body. Ideally, you need Wacom and a lot of time - then the hair you draw will be very good indeed. However, I found that this technique is not bad too, and it's much faster.

This artwork was especially fun to do. I had clear idea of what I want to achieve, and used couple of Photoshop tricks to do that. To start, take your old jeans (new will not do :-) and scan them. Here is what I got in scanned image.

- many respected icon designers consider Illustrator better tool to design icons - http://blog.turbomilk.com/ . I do not own or know Illustrator, but I'm pretty good at Photoshop, and I found that it can be tweaked to create icons fast and easy too.

- the best way to design icons (even in small sizes) is vectors. In Photoshop, they are made with Shape and Pen tools. My personall approach is to create vectors in solid colors (one vector in each layer) and then apply various layer effects, such as gradients and strokes.

So, what can be done to make Photoshop the best icon - designing tool?

First of all, have a plug-in to save icon files from photoshop files, such as IconBuilder from http://iconfactory.com/software/iconbuilder/

It is a good idea to have template file to start with. IconBuilder comes with Essential folder, including some of such templates (first picture shows one of them).

I take a lot of digital photos, but I'm not professional photographer, and my photos often need improving. The most common problem for me is that a photo is too light. There are probably advanced techniques of configuring photo camera and adjusting the photo in Photoshop, but I dont really have time to study them. So I found an easy trick to make such photos better very fast. Lets take a photo shown on the right. It need to be a bit darker. You can adjust its levels (Ctrl-L) or simply apply Auto levels (Ctrl-Shift-L), but it doesnt always produces good results.

The DUALITY wallpaper was inspired by an amazing fractal freeware called ContextFree - http://www.ozonehouse.com/ContextFree/ . After some tweaking I produced the fractal shown here (image size reduced).

My warmest greetings! On this page, I will show you how easy it is to create photo-realistic image of waterdrops with only Adobe Photoshop and a mouse. Let's start with new document (I usually set size to 3200x2400 pixels) and fill it with dark-blue.

This very short tutorial is to express my belief in the fact that default layer effects settings in photoshop are really bad. Each setting (bland mode, size, angle, etc) should be always carefully tuned to fit into general style of your design. Shown left is 2 text layers with 2 effects, drop shadow and bevel. Here I simply turned them on...